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Tuesday, May 28, 2013Rhoda K. Faust is the administrative assistant for the Walker Percy Center for Writing and Publishing. She is the former proprietor of the Maple Street Book Shop, an independent bookstore in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded by her family in 1964. Walker Percy was a frequent visitor of the Maple Street Book Shop; Faust met him when she was a child and maintained a close friendship with him for many years. Recently, she agreed to help Open Road celebrate Percy’s legacy by sharing some of her memories...

Wednesday, March 28, 2012Welcome back to Open Road’s fourth Critical Symposium. Our subject in this month’s series is Walker Percy, author of the classic novel The Moviegoer. Today’s contribution comes from Patrick Samway, who wrote the definitive Percy biography. In an enlightening personal essay, Samway describes his special friendship with the writer The New York Times called “our severest moralist, and one of our most philosophical novelists.” Please feel...

Monday, March 26, 2012Open Road’s Critical Symposium returns this week with a new series focusing on the great Southern novelist Walker Percy. The central theme of Percy’s work was the decline of religion and spirituality in modern society. We’ve therefore asked our contributors to discuss this aspect of Percy’s work and how he handled questions of faith in his own life.

We begin with an essay by Brent Short, who conducted an in-depth interview with Percy in 1990 after the publication of...

Thursday, February 02, 2012Over the past couple of weeks Open Road has been celebrating the life and work of novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. with a series of critical essays. Our final installment in the symposium comes from author M.G. Stephens. This essay provides a moving and lucid portrait of the New York literary world that influenced Selby in his early years.

M.G. Stephens has published eighteen books, including the novel The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, which Roddy Doyle recently called "a great, great...